May

12

Many years ago, my brother-in-law was working a high school summer job that involved … oh, I don’t even know what it was. Something like landscaping, I guess. His crew had stopped for lunch near a school sports field in order to ogle a girls’ soccer practice, and my brother-in-law — let’s just refer to him by his name, which is Joe — saw that a seagull was trying to steal his sandwich. With the intent of scaring it away, Joe picked up a screwdriver and threw it, but some horrible twist of fate sent the tool flying end over end and plunging directly into the bird’s back. Like, impaling the damn thing. So here’s this seagull with a screwdriver gruesomely embedded into its flesh, staggering around with its wings splayed out, and Joe figures it’s going to die and better to end its life quickly before it tries to fly off with a fatal wound. So he picks it up by the head and starts swinging the body around and around in order to break its neck. That’s the point where Joe looks up and notices, for the first time, that all the girls are staring at him — a freaky-looking hunched-over guy who’s got a death grip on a seagull and is whipping it around in a circle, and it looks like he gouged it with a screwdriver first, what the fuck — with open-mouthed horror. As Joe carries on, feeling caught in a nightmare, some of the girls start crying.

I have no idea what happened after that. I’m only telling you this because you know how the trend with blogs lately is to have a super meaningful conclusion to a random story? Like my kids melted down at Target but that’s okay because parenthood is like a box of beautiful chocolates lying in the sun or whatever? Don’t you kinda miss when people just wrote about whatever, and there didn’t need to be a nice tidy ending?

I had a miserable, miserable day today. I am so glad you posted this story. I laughed so hard imagining poor Joe and the girls. And then I truly lost all control with the video the first commenter posted. Thank you.

I DO miss that; sometimes I start a post thinking it’s going to end all neat and tidy and it doesn’t. And I have to be ok with that. So thank you for this.

Aileen on
May 13th, 2014 6:34 am

Oh come on!!! It’s not a real blog post without all the kittens, and butterflies, and softly lit pictures of butter.

Doesn’t it end with Joe pulling the screwdriver out of seagull, doing emergency surgery with the screwdriver, a plastic fork, and a granola bar wrapper? And the bird lives, and is now a valued and loving member of his family. ?

“And as I swung that seagull around by the neck, the soft sun shining down on all of us, its squawks of pain and distress filling the air, I realized something. Those girls, even in all their horror, were seeing the majesty and the grand tragedy of life all at once. Because sometimes that’s life, isn’t it? We make choices, even simple ones like throwing a screwdriver at a seagull, and those choices can go awry. Just like parenting. Just like life. We were all connected in that moment, in the warm summer sun. I can only hope they understood it as I did, all these years later.”

I am totally fine with impaling/breaking the neck of any seagull. Those freakin’ things make it just about impossible to eat on the beach. And I’d like to kick the people who encourage them to eat by feeding them on the beach. We were swarmed by the little buggers who rushed over in Siesta Key when we just OPENED THE COOLER to get a drink. They had been trained by the other tourists that opening cooler = food.

dorrie on
May 13th, 2014 9:37 am

LOLS best blog entry in forever

Laura Broder on
May 13th, 2014 10:34 am

This is amazing and made my day.

Claire on
May 13th, 2014 10:57 am

Agreed. Not naming names cause that’s not cool but there’s a couple of blogs I used to love that have gone so sickly and schmaltzy and wannabe meaningful they make me want to vom.

These blogs used to be piss funny and random. Now they are self conscious and borign as fuck. So yeah, like the seagull story. Like your blog too BTW, read for years.x

Claire on
May 13th, 2014 10:58 am

Agreed. Not naming names cause that’s not cool but there’s a couple of blogs I used to love that have gone so sickly and schmaltzy and wannabe meaningful they make me want to vom.

These blogs used to be piss funny and random. Now they are self conscious and boring as fuck. So yeah,I like the seagull story. I Like your blog too BTW, read for years.x

Shawna on
May 13th, 2014 11:00 am

Is that… is that a real photo? Or photoshopped? Because it is the awesome!

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